


Principessa

by listentothewordsyousay



Category: Law & Order
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25154134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/listentothewordsyousay/pseuds/listentothewordsyousay
Summary: Kneeling beside her hospital bed, he had the sudden, deranged recollection of the prince kneeling beside Snow White's bed. Some Prince Charming he was, he thought bitterly.
Relationships: Claire Kincaid/Jack McCoy
Comments: 5
Kudos: 3





	1. snow white

It was the early hours of the morning when the telephone rang. It seemed to have a different echo from the cheerful telephone that rang mid-morning or the one which buzzed with promise in the evening. It was a cold, threatening ring that sent him running headlong and suddenly sober into the pink sunrise.

Even as he battered the door to her room open and dropped to her bedside, he had no recollection of getting to the hospital; all he could hear was Van Buren’s words, tangling with his own in a hellish soundtrack of ‘she can go to hell… there’s been an accident…’ 

It seemed like half of her beautiful body had been broken; lines and tubes infiltrated plaster and grotesque metal structures. Her right hand lay gently on the blanket, the skin punctured by more plastic tubing. He softly wrapped her thumb in his own hand, willing the gesture to somehow be enough for a miracle.

She looked so completely peaceful, dark eyelashes softly resting above her pink cheeks, that he had a sudden, deranged recollection of the prince kneeling beside Snow White. Some Prince Charming, he thought bitterly; the stench of beer from his own clothes suddenly hit him as the adrenaline drained from his body and the hangover arrived. 

He kissed her wrist, too ashamed and scared to touch her face, and prayed, wished, hoped, for a miracle, for her eyelids to flutter awake. 

Eventually he hauled his own body, broken in an entirely different way, into a chair, and slept.


	2. beauty and the beast

‘She’s a beautiful girl,’ a nurse had remarked kindly, waking him from the stupor. He dropped his head into his hands as the reality settled in again, the bright lights of the room too much to deal with on top of everything else.

The nurse’s voice came closer. ‘She’s doing as well as we could have possibly have hoped. Your wife is on the way; why don’t you get home and have a shower before she gets here?’

His brain sluggishly put together the parts of speech; why would his wife be coming? He didn’t have a wife, any more. His mouth seemed to work independently of his mind, groaning seconds before he realised that the nurse thought he was Claire’s father and not her…. 

He didn’t know what he was and he couldn’t begin to explain it, not today, not gripped by this hellish hangover, not with the words ‘to hell with her’ still swirling bitterly with the liquor fumes.

It had happened before; she was so young looking, especially when she wasn’t dressed for work. His vanity was bothered more than he liked to let on, but she didn’t care. 

It had been early in the summer, but hot enough for her to let her hair curl around her forehead and wear a strappy red sundress. They had stopped for lunch, holding hands, only for a disapproving hostess to make a faux innocent comment about her father. Claire had only slid closer to him, tangling her legs with his, and gently kissed his cheek before nuzzling into his shoulder, all the time daring the woman to comment further. The glint in her eye had made him laugh all through lunch, before all but throwing her into a cab to finish off the performance at home. 

He stood up woozily, wallowing in the nurse’s pity, before realising that the woman was right, but for all the wrong reasons. He couldn’t be here, in this state, when Claire’s mother arrived.


	3. ariel

Her parents and step father had arrived and he had stepped back, not least because they apparently had no clue that he and Claire were…. He had no understanding of what words she would use for him, what they _were_.

His words to Lennie that night still echoed horribly around his mind, illustrated by the memories of the way she had shaken off his embrace when they had gone to bed after watching Scott die. She had tossed and turned for what seemed like hours while he pretended to sleep, not wanting to start the same argument again but stubbornly refusing to give up the high ground and gather her back into his arms. He thought they had been over, but why would she have come back?

When he lay awake now, he wondered how to climb this new mountain; could he call, should he call? Could he write? Did she want him to? She knew where he was. Was she able to? He picked up the telephone receiver, started drafts, tore them up, threw the receiver down.

He eventually turned to the cliché and sent flowers, reasoning that they could be from the department and it was not entirely inappropriate, and that she could answer if she wanted to, refusing to entertain the voice that whispered cruelly ‘if she was able to’.

It was a Sunday morning, bright and clear, when his telephone rang. He had answered it absentmindedly, half expecting it to be Ellen or maybe even Rebecca. He repeated his greeting when no-one spoke, and was on the cusp of hanging up when he recognised the little gasp of air on the end, somewhere between the way she blew out exasperatedly when he made some unreasonable demand half way through a case, and the way she sighed when he put her hands on her hips.

The cup of coffee he was holding tumbled to the floor as he said her name.

**Author's Note:**

> During quarantine, some have learned new languages, studied, cooked, etc. I have watched vintage L&O and fallen totally for Jack and Claire.


End file.
